Associate Professor

Rhetoric ande Writing

Research Areas

Raciolinguistics, critical whiteness studies, language ideologies, racial linguistic justice, and writing program administration

Contact Information

Email: bdavila@unm.edu
Office Location: PAIS 1223

Biography

Bethany Davila earned her PhD in English and Education from the University of Michigan. She was drawn to the field of composition and rhetoric because of its commitment to pursing social justice through research and education. Dr. Davila’s research focuses on exploring the relationship between language and identity, particularly through the lenses of raciolinguistics and critical whiteness studies. She uses her scholarship, teaching, and administrative work to pursue racial linguistic justice.

Dr. Davila has received UNM’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award and multiple awards for her scholarship, which appears in College Composition and Communication, WPA: Writing Program Administration, Written Communication, and elsewhere. Her monograph, Writing Whiteness: Uprooting White Language Supremacy in First-Year Writing Programs (2026) was published by NCTE’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series. She is also co-editor (with Cristyn L. Elder) of Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace.